My opinion piece about the use of alcohol in African Traditional Rituals

Ancestral rituals or a binge-drinking festival?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Trevor Hlungwani

I want to know from the preservers of African culture why “the strong stuff” is central to practicing one’s culture or appeasing the ancestors. I am sure I am not the first person to ask this critical but overlooked question.

Before I am labelled as a tribalist, as I was once called, my question relates specifically to the institutions of my culture. As a native of the Limpopo Province I have been exposed to these ways of living since childhood.

I will not generalize and say all South Africans indigenous cultures use the traditional home-brewed beer, “Umqomboti”, in their rituals but I can categorically state that Umqomboti has been adopted as the “Messiah” which connects the custodians of most cultures to the ancestors. I am not saying it’s a wrong thing but I basically seek to know how the concept of using alcohol started.

I mean what significance can alcohol play in advancing the plight of a poverty-stricken people: even if the beer is an offering to the ancestors, nothing positive can ever come from something as destructive as alcohol! I know people can agree with me on that.

What happens in these rituals is that the old man says a few words, calling the ancestors by their names and pleading with them to help the family with their needs, pours a little alcohol in the ground to respect them. Then he circulates the clay container among all men in the ritual. This continues all day until the crowd staggers home to return tomorrow to cure the “Babalaza”.

By extension they will slaughter an innocent goat, I don’t know if the SPCA know about this but I guess they would have a lot of animals to rescue.

My question is simple: are we supposed to get drunk in these ceremonies and, how will it improve our already miserable life?

It’s no surprise that we African people are most passionate about the bottle because alcohol was entrenched psychologically to us through our beloved ancestors.

Our already colonised mind is defenceless when culture is used to disarm us even more: we spend so much of our minimum wages on ancestral rituals when, in actual fact, they are nothing big but binge-drinking festivals.

Hence the plight of the black men remains the same, if not worse because we are not sober-minded enough to discuss “Programmes of Action”